kunstenaars

piet dieleman

On Repetition and difference in Piet Dieleman's work
by Lorenzo Benedetti

Repetition and difference, on these two elements is moving the work of Piet Dieleman based on the constant repetitions who alludes to the variability of differences. The circles are trying to create a space behind the canvas. The perforation of the monochromatic field is questioning the flatness of the color. The variable rotation of the circles plays on a dynamic of gravity and fluctuation. The relation between them is based on the combination of the chaos theory related to two simple variable: the color and the form. All the rest, inside those terms, is possible.
The color is the material element creating the circle that, in this case, is the void. But the void plays a determinant role in this optical construction. It became pure space, the "behind" of the surface. So in the series of circles the problematic of the flatness of the surface is not based on the foreground but on the depths of the canvas. The circles is creating a negation of the flatness of the canvas through, by the middle of the void, the generation of space. The balance between the purity of the color and the perfection of the form create the frozen moment of stability that determinate the painting. The white circles are the perspective of the canvas, based on the concept of subtraction. And subtraction is also the operation of changing the color palette from color to gray scale. The translation to black and white is following the same minimalism actions of the geometrical forms.
In his videogallery the German filmmaker Gerry Schum invited Gino de Dominicis to make a work in his series. The artist was sitting at the edge of a lake and was throwing stones into the water until instead of circle the stone would create a square. The screen, like the canvas, is a rectangles, and the circular form is always confronting with the rectangular form. In his poetic De Dominicis knew that the moment of transformation of the circular into the rectangular form could have find place in an infinite point.
In Dieleman paintings the tension between the circle and the rectangular of the canvas finds its solution in the infinite variable of combinations.The paintings of Dieleman are based on a continuing landscape. The repetition through the different works suggest a continuation from one canvas to the other. The border of the painting is only a physical condition that the content would like to escape. The intensity of the color is changing like the green of a field would change in the depht of a perspective. The intensity variable of the colorfield became an optical distance.Like in the photographs the artist is working on a series of painting trying to collect all different forms of gray. An enciclopedia of emotions based on the reduced scales of the grays. Sometimes the color is created by the addition of layers that where the bases of the research of the right color, the right emotion. Other have just a few overlapping of gray, is still visible the white background of the canvas.
A famous Italian art historian, Lionello Venturi, active in the first half of the XX century was using to say, in order to recognize old masters paintings, that black and white photographs where more truthful than the colors one. Of course the color technology used to reproduce images at that time was not so sophisticated as it is nowadays, but there is indeed a more realistic way to show the materiality of the form in black and white. If we see from close the black and white small paintings of Dieleman we see how there is a kind of realism that is more evident than in the color paintings. The synthesis of the three body of work in the exhibition, the color/black and white painting and the photographs, is given by the work Inkjet print 2010. The grid of dots are playing an optical effect of space mixing with the horizontal lines. The two series of work synthesized are realized with a technical reproduction in black an white that is reconnecting to the former body of photographic works.